You are here

sockpuppets

sockpuppets: Page 1

The Youtube Sockpuppets Project seeks to find out if politicians and other groups are using fake accounts to comment on that site's videos.
The term "sockpuppets" (see the link) refers to fake user accounts designed to mask someone's affiliation, promote something as if it's more popular than it is, and so on. I've long suspected that some comments left on certain political videos were from one person or group controlling several fake accounts.

USA Today reporter Tom Vanden Brook ("TVB") began looking into Pentagon contractors paid to spread propaganda in other countries earlier this year. As a result of that he was the subject of a propaganda campaign inside the U.S. by one or more of those contractors (link).

If you dislike CNN and their completely inaccurate self description of being a real news site as much as I do, the video below (cached) might just be absolutely hilarious. It features Soledad OBrien and three guests discussing a picture of a supposed restaurant receipt which shows a 1% tip and which includes a supposed note from the patron saying, "Get a real job".

As can be seen on the tea parties page, I have a very, very low opinion of their movement. However, there is one good thing about them: they're dumb enough to help me show how they're vile idiots. And, they've done that many, many times.
And, I'll be compiling them into a series.

Public relations firms employed by the billionaire Koch family have been caught using "sockpuppets" to edit Wikipedia pages about the Kochs. And, one of those firms admits that they use people to promote the Kochs on blogs and news sites.
Unfortunately, ThinkProgress [1] doesn't discuss what the latter consists of, but I would not be surprised at all to discover that the vile and idiotic replies I receive to my anti-tea parties comments around the web (a recent example here) are coming from sockpuppets for Koch, FreedomWorks, and similar groups.
From [1]:
Last year, Koch Industries began...

Barack Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod owns an astroturfing company.
And, during the campaign the comments at many major sites (WaPo, Politico, Digg, etc.) were chock full of sockpuppets posting lame jokes, comments insulting McCain and/or Palin, and comments extolling the virtues of The One.
Could those two things have something to do with each other?

Scott Shane of the New York Times offers "Obama and '60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths" (originally titled "Obama Had Met Ayers, but the Two Are Not Close"). If you believe the NYT, then everything's fine and dandy, and Barack Obama and 60s radical Bill Ayers are not close. The fact that they aren't close and never were close and nothing funny went on and there's nothing to see here is especially important because Ayers is a former and allegedly unrepentant terrorist who's since been, in Shane's words, "rehabilitated".
On the other hand, if you actually want the truth, compare the second...

Via [1] comes this article from Business Week about Barack Obama chief strategist David Axelrod:
From the same River North address, Axelrod operates a second business, ASK Public Strategies, that discreetly plots strategy and advertising campaigns for corporate clients to tilt public opinion their way... On behalf of ComEd and Comcast, the firm helped set up front organizations that were listed as sponsors of public-issue ads. Industry insiders call such practices "Astroturfing," a reference to manufacturing grassroots support...
Oddly enough, some months ago I noted a very strange blog...

I'll leave it to political scientists, political analysts, and psychologists to try to figure out why the Republican Party (GOP) is unable to use the internet to their advantage and I'll just point out one example of how the Democrats and Barack Obama are eating John McCain's lunch.
In the US Elections 2008 subsection on Digg right now, almost all of the popular and "hot" (upcoming) stories are anti-McCain, a couple are anti-GOP in general, and almost all the rest are pro-Obama. Not a single pro-McCain story makes either list. And, several are from the Huffington Post.

Somewhere from a few hundred to 700 or more persons were arrested in Postville, Iowa earlier today as part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid of the Agriprocessors meat packing plant in the town. That plant produces kosher meat and is owned by the Rubashkin family, Hasidic Jews from New York; this page has more details on the culture clash after the bought the plant and seem to have gained a great deal of power in the town.

There seem to be a large number of sock puppets (per Wikipedia an "online identity used for purposes of deception within an Internet community") running loose on various blog sites and leaving comments supporting various candidates such as Barack Obama, Mike Huckabee, and occasionally others.